I realized lately that while I love Twitter for my *personal* life, for my *professional* one I find it a complete and utter waste of time. When I looked at the number of impressions each of my tweets gets, it's pathetically low despite my follower count. There's just too much out there on Twitter to see and if you're not personally engaged with someone, it's so easy to gloss over 140 characters because usually there's nothing of substance there anyhow.

I did a little study last month by using trackable links on all of my tweets to see if anyone clicked on them. In an entire month, there were three. Three measly clicks. In my mind, that says Twitter is a complete waste of my professional time. But we're all told authors *have* to be on Twitter.

Why?

Why do we have to waste valuable writing time to engage with nothing? To send our hard fought words off into the ether? Can someone explain this to me?